Saturday, July 09, 2005

The media seems almost obsessed by the question of whether or not London has experienced Western Europe's first suicide bombing. I find the question vaguely interesting, but not nearly as interesting as to whether the attacks were carried out by foreign agents or by people born and raised in Britain. This strikes me as the fundamental question as it will determine how Britain (& the rest of the world) reacts to what happened on Thursday.

Today's NY Times indicates that London's police are leaning towards homegrown extremists. If this is true, if the bombers were born and raised in Britain, then Thursday's attack has less in common with September 11 than it has with Oklahoma City.

In fact, homegrown extremists willing to kill fellow citizens on a mass scale is exactly what McVeigh & Nichols were. They were incensed by the deaths at Waco and had no faith or trust in their own government. Substitute "right wing" for "Islamic" and you have nearly the same story. In reality, the Islamic extremists and America's "right wing" extremists seem to have an awful lot in common (and, yes, I'm aware of the theories on the links between al Qaeda and McVeigh & Nichols).